Seagate: 8TB HDDs have hit sampling phase

The first HDDs with a capacity of 8TB are expected to be available later this year as Seagate CEO Steve Luczo revealed to investors that it shipped its first 8TB HDD samples to large customers for initial testing.
Luczo didn't reveal much details about the 8TB HDDs, he didn't share info about the techonology behind the drives nor did he talk about a specific release date.

“We have also delivered 8 terabyte customer development units to major customers and cloud service providers and the initial customer feedback has been very positive,” Luczo said during the call. “While it’s still early in the development of our Kinetic object-based storage platform, we are in deep technical discussions with a very broad-base of enterprise customers. We believe our focus on developing key values for object-based storage will make the Kinetic platform a differentiated offering in the cloud storage marketplace.”